From the Old to the New Regime in Toulouse: Judiciary Professionals in Spatial Perspective, 1695-1830 Nicolas Marqué, Jack Thomas To cite this version: Nicolas Marqué, Jack Thomas. From the Old to the New Regime in Toulouse: Judiciary Professionals in Spatial Perspective, 1695-1830. 2019. halshs-02126457 HAL Id: halshs-02126457 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02126457 Preprint submitted on 11 May 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. From the Old to the New Regime in Toulouse: Judiciary Professionals in Spatial Perspective, 1695-1830 Nicolas Marqué and Jack Thomas Université de Toulouse Since Roman times, Toulouse has primarily been a regional market and administrative center for a large area between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and between the Central Massif and the Pyrenees. When the city and its hinterland were annexed into the kingdom of France in the 13th century, its role remained very much the same. The creation of a royal appeals court in the 15th century – the Parliament of Toulouse – reinforced the administrative role of the city as people flocked to the court from a vast area covering the equivalent of 13 of our present-day departments and the major part of the new administrative region called Occitania (see map of Parlement and map of Occitania)1. Map 1 - The territory of the new Occitania Region since January 2016 If the Parliament was the biggest and most prestigious court in the region, a number of other tribunals also judged all types of cases with church, seigneurial, tax, salt, forestry and water courts and so on.… As a result, the administration of justice became one of the principal activities of the city and of its inhabitants. This remained true up to the French 1 For recent overviews of the history of Toulouse, see Jean-Marie Pailler, Annie Thomas and Jack Thomas, Une petite histoire de Toulouse, Pau, Editions Cairn, 2016; and Michel Taillefer (dir.), Nouvelle histoire de Toulouse, Toulouse, Privat, 2002. 1 Revolution. and the abolition of the Parliament and the reorganization of the judiciary system during and immediately after2. Old Regime Toulouse shared many of the characteristics of a pre-industrial city, as presented by Gideon Sjoberg3. Even if the city counted hundreds of merchants, they clearly occupied a less prestigious place than elites coming from religious or administrative spheres, especially the judges of the Parliament. Almost universally noble, these judges were the richest people in the city, as Jean Sentou showed in his studies of wealth at the end of the 18th century4. Their fortunes came from their vast land-holdings in the area around Toulouse; they were classic rentiers who had benefitted from the construction of the Canal Royal de Languedoc (Canal du Midi) in 1681, allowing them to sell their wheat crop to distant Mediterranean markets5. This wealth then was based on their domination of the surrounding countryside rather than on urban based revenues or even urban based property-holding. The situation of religious elites was somewhat different, even if the Catholic church drew considerable revenues from the countryside agricultural rents and church tithes. Religious establishments held much property in Toulouse, as much as one-third of the surface of intra-mural Toulouse6. Secular public buildings were fewer and occupied much less space. The most important and the biggest were the Parliament (former castle) with its prison, the town hall (le Capitole), the Seneschal court, the market hall, the treasury and the mint (see map). Of these, as we shall see, the Parliament was by far the most important in numbers of people connected to its day to day functioning. 2 J. Thomas, « Toulouse, capitale judiciaire à l’époque moderne : un essai de bilan historiographique et cartographique », in Jacques Poumarède (dir.), Territoires et lieux de justice, Paris, La Documentation française, 2010. 3 G. Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City, Past and Present, London, Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1960. 4 J. Sentou, Fortunes et Groupes sociaux à Toulouse sous la Révolution (1789-1799). Essai d’histoire statistique, Toulouse, Privat, 1969. 5 G. Frêche, Toulouse et la région Midi-Pyrénées au siècle des Lumières, vers 1670-1789, Paris, Cujas, 1974. 6 N. Marqué, Géohistoire de Toulouse et des villes de parlement (vers 1680-vers 1830). 3 volumes, Thèse d’histoire, Université de Toulouse, 2015, p. 328-470. 2 Map 2 - The principal courts in Toulouse between 1650 and 1790 Another characteristic element of the pre-industrial European city lay in the massive walls; in Toulouse they were inherited from Roman times, at least for parts of them. The ramparts had been enlarged, remodeled and more or less maintained since then and were a visual marker of the city’s main area and an important psychological element of urban identity7. As we shall see, the city walls much influenced residential patterns up to the French Revolution. The study of the judiciary population of Toulouse over time is possible thanks to important documentary resources that cover a long period from the end of the 17th century to about 1830, some 150 years. These resources fall into three categories: 1) census type records that were either linked to tax assessments (1695 and 1790) or simply to a classic census (1830-31); 2) property registers that detailed property-holding in the city – 1680, the late 18th century and 1830; 3) local almanacs or directories that list office-holders and other professions for the years 1789-1790 and 1830. We have used all these documents in order to accumulate as much data as possible about the people employed in the judiciary sector of the economy and where they lived. We can thus propose a geo-historical analysis of this important part of Toulouse’s economy and social structure, as well as its evolution from about 1695 to about 1830. 7 See, for example, Christopher Friedrich, The Early Modern City, 1450-1750, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 23 3 The head tax of 1695 required each profession to pay a predetermined sum, therefore the declarations of taxable amounts were thus crucial element of these fiscal evaluation. The quality of these documents is very good so it allows a detailed analysis of professions, of measures of relative wealth and of social prestige (as well as quite detailed spatial location). A second source was the census of 1790, the result of a law voted in December 1789, the very beginning of the Revolution. The government had three principal motivations – calculate the tax assessment among the population; define as precisely as possible the electoral corps; prepare lists for future military recruitment. The census was undertaken over 4 days in January 1790, and its quality was very uneven from area to another. Census takers often left out professions for whole blocks. Isabelle Caubet, the specialist of this census, estimates that about 50 % of the heads of households were left uninformed as to professions8. She and we have been able to improve this statistic for judiciary professions by using the Baour Almanach which gave information for almost 600 men from the Parliament judges to the less prestigious and wealthy scribes and bailiffs9. We also used the land tax registers from the Revolutionary and Imperial periods to complete information on individuals. These improvements do not, unfortunately, correct all the approximations of the 1790 census. A third source is the 1830-1831 census. It was the first of a reorganized effort to enumerate the whole population of France. It provides a detailed and fairly accurate information about the heads of households and their families for the whole city of Toulouse. A fourth source are the Toulouse land registers used are part of a long-going project by the Toulouse city government linking its present-day documents with a set of historical documents going back to 1680. Work on the Toulouse historical GIS began in 2002 when a team was constituted within the Municipal Archives. The first two layers concerned the land registers from 1680 and 1830 for the intra-mural parts of the city10. When Nicolas Marqué joined the team in 2010, he worked to integrate documents for the Revolutionary and Imperial layer for the central city and the urban continuum. 8 I. Caubet, Approches démographiques et sociales des ménages toulousains entre 1695 et 1790, Toulouse, History thesis, 3 volumes, 1999. 9 The Baour Almanach was published every year during the last decades of the Old Regime. It combined features of a city directory and an official institutional guide for Toulouse and for much of the Languedoc province. For our uses, it furnished detailed lists with names and addresses of the men who worked in the major judiciary institutions as well as the barristers and attorneys and other minor officials. 10 https://www.urban-hist.toulouse.fr/uhplus/ 4 From Sources to historical GIS GIS is a software which associates a set of data and digital techniques that allow one to treat objects that have a spatial dimension. In a GIS, each “object” whether it be a plot of land or a building takes the form of a polygon to which are linked geographical coordinates locating it in space as well as assigned data that describe its properties (for instance its owner, its size or its nature).